[Elecraft] SDR UI (was: Dayton review)

Craig Rairdin craigr at laridian.com
Tue May 22 10:56:39 EDT 2007


> I think the way the SDR concept was designed was by 
> thinking outside of the box - but - I think the 
> designers jumped into another box.

I think the problem is when they jumped from a hard-wired modulation/signal
processing/tuning idea to a software-defined modulation/signal
processing/tuning concept they opted to use the one computing platform that
everyone has at their disposal: the pc (to be distinguished from "PC" which
might imply Windows). Since the pc has powerful UI and other interfaces
readily available, it was convenient to implement the UI there, too. It's as
if they just "gave up" on the UI and accepted the suboptimum UI resources of
the signal processing computer on their desktop.

> Of course the SDR type of radios is still in the 
> beginning stages as a perceived radio.  What would 
> happen if the technology from the SDR radio is 
> packaged in a box with knobs and switches along 
> with a niffty display.

Well, you'd have something like a K3. The K3 may not be completely open to
customer-modification, but much of the capabilities of the radio are
determined by its software.

The problem is that developing software for an SDR that comes in a box with
controls on the front panel would require specialized hardware and software
to interface with the box. But in the end I think you'd have a better user
experience... Imagine, for example, a reconfigurable front panel either with
excess knobs and switches that could be incorporated into the software, or
one with modular knobs and switches that could be plugged together like Lego
blocks to create a custom panel.

Maybe this stuff already exists. I don't pay attention to that market
because it asks me to do work I'd prefer to pay others to do.

Craig
NZ0R



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